Friday Fireside Chat – Rita McGrath & Julia Boorstin

Traditional models of leadership have been under fire for some time. Command and Control, the chattering classes say, should be relegated to the dustbins of history and in its place should emerge a new kind of leadership, one which is inspiring, empathetic and adaptive. It isn’t a coincidence, argues my Friday Fireside Chat guest, CNBC’s Media and Tech correspondent Julia Boorstin. In her wonderful book “When Women Lead – What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, How We Can Learn From Them,” she shows how women have quietly triumphed in more and more bastions of formerly male dominated spaces, such as Silicon Valley and in industries such as retail to apparel. In exploring this amazing progress more deeply, she finds that these leaders are indeed adaptive, empathetic, likely to appreciate diversity and finding new markets in opportunities their male counterparts have overlooked, sometimes for generations. I am super excited to welcome her to the Fireside (we’ve been working on this for at least 2 years!) and hope you can find the time to join us. Tom Peters had foreshadowed Julia’s findings by several decades, arguing that our complex, dynamic times lend themselves to women’s leadership. Julia’s research shows that he was absolutely right!